WARNING: Contains profanity and sexual references that the more sensitive types among us will probably find offensive—definitely NSFW—but still extremely profound, serious, and ultimately addresses the question (in a New York accent), “What are we doing here?”. Well worth the 46 minutes (and it’s entertaining).
Human beings are not interchangeable economic units.
America is not an economic zone.
America is not just a collection of ideas.
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All excellent points, yet ones that seem to elude the supposedly sophisticated thinkers. When they figure it out — and they will eventually — it may well be too late.
At first I felt just irritated by Mr. Hyde, but after a few minutes I totes adored him.
Still: Roach has a piece about H1B on Am Greatness today. After reading it, I think all this crap about American culture, the uniqueness o& individuals, etc., is kinda a smokescreen. If Roach is right, American employers want the H1B program (no matter what they say) because they can get the holders of those visas cheaper. That means equally qualified Americans can’t get those jobs. So I think Hyde’s stuff about “non-quantifiable” accomplishments , while I agree on one level, ignores the fact that the benefits to American businesses of H1B workers ARE eminently quantifiable.
Let’s get rid of, or radically reform, H1B for one reason: we need to get back to meritocracy, and this program is interfering with our developing our own, native, American meritocracy.
He’s a classic sh*tposter, if you’ll pardon the language. I’m almost at the end of his 45-minute tirade and, I have to say, it’s the best 45 minutes I’ve wasted in a long time.
Hyde made this same point. Both things can be true: culture matters and tech bros want slave labor.
Hyde addresses this point explicitly. He said something to the effect that you can quantify (particularly retrospectively) the cost of some things (e.g. H1-Bs vs American workers), but you can’t say that importing 200 million Indians will get you the Chrysler Building and Art Deco architecture or the interstate highway system.
Ding! Ding! Ding!!! 
As an anthropologist, why is really thrilling to me about this video is the unabashed admission/assumption that: America has a culture!!!
Of course we DO, anybody who knows what the word means knows that. But lately we’ve been dominated by people who DON’T know. Remember that li’l white “college” “student” who fawned on Ward Churchill: “Oh, Professor, you come from such a wonderful, interesting culture! I wish I had a culture!”
(Check it out next time you’re in the cafeteria, you dumb coney: you do. Y’might wanna try a bit of “participant observation”…you heap big idiot.)
I have to admit that Sam Hyde’s letter to Elon really resonated with me, but there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m being played (manipulated) or falling into some kind of trap. We may never know what is genuine and what is some kind of psy-op.
If it is not a collection of ideas, what is it?
The entire legal structure, including the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, is just a collection of ideas. From the Ten Commandments, Ben Franklin’s virtues, John Wooden’s Pyramid of Excellence and free market capitalism, it’s all ideas.
I think it is a valid criticism of the left to say that the US isn’t magical ground. Meaning, you do not take and fully accept the ideas of an American by stepping onto US soil. Sam must think it is magical soil in a different sense. That if you happen to be spawned here you have some special connection to the magical soil.
The quote was “America is not just a collection of ideas.” Note the operative word “just”.
Ok. Then what is it beyond just a collection of ideas?
Off the top of my head: culture, religion, race…a shared heritage and moral foundation.
How is it interfering with meritocracy? I maintain the number one thing that impacts meritocracy in the US is affirmative action. This is orders of magnitude more impactful than H1B visas.
Here is an example. If 50% of the mechanical engineers must be female and more males are interested in mechanical engineering than females, the number of mechanical engineers will be limited by the percentage of females interested. That is simply math. The only part that can be considered subjective is whether there is a difference in interest between the various groups that must remain in balance.
You’re absolutely right about this. We need to do a thorough house cleaning. The problem is that none of our leaders are honest about anything. Importing foreign expertise instead of fixing our domestic problems is just a band-aid. Maybe if we actually felt the consequences of our bad decisions it might drive change.
All of those except shared heritage are ideas.
Race is a shared idea too? It has no bearing on anything? We are all interchangeable economic units?
Correct, I missed race.
Correct, I missed race.
But does it have any bearing on anything? Do you believe that humans are interchangeable economic units?
Let’s quit pussyfooting around. Are you okay with the total replacement of white people?
I don’t know what interchangeable economic units means. It is kind of a strawman argument. It tries to imply that all a human is is an economic unit and that a janitor can be made a doctor. That we can hire a person off the street in India to work as a programmer. That is good to stir peoples emotions, but I don’t understand how that applies to the visa argument.
The H1B visa isn’t saying you can plop any person in any job. It is almost the opposite. An H1B visa, without abuse, is for filling jobs that cannot be filled by hiring a US citizen.
By definition, without abuse, it cannot be taking jobs that should go to a US citizen.
Also, to say we should kill a program because it is being abused is like saying we should defund the police because some police abuse their power.
If you go beyond the one off stories and don’t assume every CEO is a bad actor, you will learn that there simply are not enough STEM graduates that are US citizens. There are people that like to assume this is due to H1B visas. This is just bullshit. How do we know it is bullshit? Because we have all kinds of people graduating with meaningless degrees in things such as woman’s studies that have no way of paying back the cost of the degree. All these crap degree graduates don’t seem to care whether there are job opportunities, but they do if they consider a STEM degree? Right. The other reason I know it is bullshit is that I have talked to the dean of engineering for my alma mater. They have more demand than students. They actually have stopped the practice of weeding out students because there is so much demand. The third reason I know it is bullshit is that I was a hiring manager for a company that struggled to find engineers willing to move to places like Nevada, Missouri. We searched for over a year for a PI&CS engineer for a plant in South Dakota. Weird none of those many people that supposedly couldn’t get a job because Google was hiring H1B’s never applied.